Exploring the Psyche in Cyberspace

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Sociocorpus

Dan Randow’s Sociocorpus is the current amalgamation of several blogs about online groups and knowledge management. Sociocorpus is a great concept. I Googled it and it went straight to Dan’s Blog. Original! I am not sure if Dan has explained it somewhere, but I see it like this: Socius is an element in the collective psyche, as Jung might called it, or the sociometric matrix in Moreno’s language. This collective stratum consists of groups which have a life of their own more than the sum of their parts, socii. Each socius is embodied somewhere, hence corpus. And the sociocorpus has taken an evolutionary leap in the last couple of decades, it incorporates in new ways as new media evolve.

There are two barriers to be crossed before Online Collaboration can gain momentum: an “Access Hump” and a “Participation Hump”.

The Access Hump has to be crossed by each individual by learning to use a new technology, remembering the location, user name and password and rules of a new place. Some people refer to this as achieving ‘social presence’. Hand-holding works well here.

Once the Access hump is crossed, the group has to cross the Participation Hump. This occurs as people begin to contribute and others respond. The benefits emerge from the participation and the participation occurs when people expect benefits. Structured group spaces work well here.

There is a third stage in which the participation pattern becomes complex. The back-channel and links to other groups and individuals form a self-organising and wide-ranging system. Blogs work well here.